News & Commentary

Nelson Mandela's life is a rebuke to oppression and to those who would respond with frustrated resignation or hatred. It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely success story against seemingly impossible odds. South Africa's system of apartheid seemed like the purest manifestation of racial discrimination possible. The fact that the discrimination was perpetrated by a small minority of whites against a majority of blacks in their own native land dictated that the means of maintaining the cruel racial hierarchy be extreme and pervasive. That the principal actor in the destruction of this unjust system would be an activist sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa's notorious Robben Island is nearly miraculous.

Wednesday we learned that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered:
Dear commi

Live in Delaware, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania? You can rest a little bit easier today, knowing that police need a warrant before putting a GPS tracker on your car to monitor your movements. The Department of Justice has declined to appeal a Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the police violated the Fourth Amendment rights of electrician Harry Katzin when they placed a GPS tracker on his van without a warrant.

An effort is underway to significantly set back even the limited amount of government privacy oversight that currently takes place over commercial privacy in the United States. Tuesday the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade held a hearing titled Federal Trade Commission Review and Outlook. At the hearing, FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen argued for the repeal of the communications common carrier exemption which would transfer regulatory power of telecommunications networks from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the FTC. While this might sound innocuous enough, the rework could have serious implications for consumer privacy protections.

Millions of Americans are still suffering the effects of the subprime mortgage meltdown. More than four million homeowners have been foreclosed upon already, and nearly 11 million are "underwater," that is, they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. But it's not just these 15 million who are suffering, that number is much larger if you count the children who live in those homes.

This might come as a shock to you, but the privacy of many of your electronic communications has a six-month expiration date.

The

The Thanksgiving holiday is over, so it's time for Congress to get back to business and tie up some loose ends--like a new budget deal, a farm bill, and a defense spending bill for next year--before the first session of the 113th Congress comes to a close, right?